# What is the best John Carpenter movie?

> Eighteen films, two of them untouchable and several that needed a decade to find their audience. Rank them the way you would defend them.

*By YPB Team · Published September 20, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-john-carpenter-movie*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Thing** — score 1000/1000
   A 1982 Antarctic paranoia nightmare with practical effects that still have not been bettered.
2. **Halloween** — score 943/1000
   The 1978 slasher that invented the modern template, shot for pocket change and scored by Carpenter himself.
3. **The Fog** — score 724/1000
   A 1980 ghost story about a coastal town paying a hundred-year-old debt.
4. **Starman** — score 665/1000
   A 1984 science-fiction road romance that earned Jeff Bridges an Oscar nomination.
5. **Assault on Precinct 13** — score 596/1000
   Carpenter's 1976 siege thriller, a Western rebuilt inside a condemned police station.
6. **They Live** — score 517/1000
   A 1988 satire about sunglasses that reveal the aliens running the consumer economy.
7. **Escape from New York** — score 423/1000
   The 1981 dystopian heist that turned Manhattan into a prison and Kurt Russell into Snake Plissken.
8. **Christine** — score 423/1000
   The 1983 Stephen King adaptation about a 1958 Plymouth Fury with a jealous streak.
9. **Escape from L.A.** — score 423/1000
   The 1996 sequel that sends Snake Plissken into a post-earthquake island California.
10. **In the Mouth of Madness** — score 423/1000
   A 1994 Lovecraftian spiral about a horror novelist whose books rewrite reality.
11. **Dark Star** — score 423/1000
   Carpenter's 1974 student-film debut, a deadpan space comedy with a talking bomb.
12. **Memoirs of an Invisible Man** — score 423/1000
   A 1992 Chevy Chase vehicle, Carpenter's one studio comedy-thriller and his strangest detour.
13. **Big Trouble in Little China** — score 310/1000
   A 1986 action comedy in which the hero is cheerfully the least competent person on screen.
14. **The Ward** — score 310/1000
   Carpenter's 2010 return to features, a psychiatric-hospital ghost story with Amber Heard.
15. **Village of the Damned** — score 310/1000
   A 1995 remake about a town of platinum-haired children with a shared, hostile mind.
16. **Vampires** — score 310/1000
   A 1998 Western-flavored vampire hunt with James Woods dragging bloodsuckers into daylight.
17. **Prince of Darkness** — score 0/1000
   A 1987 apocalyptic horror film in which physicists and a canister of green liquid end the world.
18. **Ghosts of Mars** — score 0/1000
   A 2001 colony-under-siege picture that reworks Assault on Precinct 13 on another planet.

Tags: movies, directors, horror, sci-fi, john carpenter